Saturday, October 8. 2011

One of the few pieces of non-free software I always needed on my system is a rar unpacker. Despite that there are very good free alternatives for high-compression archivers like 7-zip or tar.xz, many people seem to like relying on a proprietary format like rar and it's in widespread use.

Years ago, someone came up with a GPLed rar unpacker, but sadly, that was never updated to support the rar version 3 format. Its development is stalled.

For that reason, some time back I suggested to the Free Software Foundation to add a free rar unpacking tool to their list of high priority projects - they did so. Happily I recently read that they've removed it. There's The Unarchiver now, based on an old amiga library. It supports a whole bunch of formats - including rar v3. It's mainly a MacOS application, but it also provides a command line tool that can be compiled in Linux.

It needs objective C, the gnustep-base libraries and it took me some time to get it to compile properly. For the Gentoo-users: I already committed an ebuild, just run "emerge unar".emerge TheUnarchiver

Update: Changed ebuild name to unar, as that's the name upstream uses for the command line version now.